A Bluesman in a Tourist Town

I live in a tourist town. It is not normal. I am not complaining mind you. I rather enjoy living in a place that others come to from all over the world for vacation. I just sometimes wish they would not all come on the same day.

The seaside community of Huntington Beach that I call home is like Newport Beach without the Ferraris. It doesn’t have Venice’s funk or Santa Monica’s cool. It is like Malibu without movie stars and Laguna Beach without artists. What Huntington Beach has is sand and lots of it. It has nine miles of beach front and nine miles of waves. It is those waves and the Jan and Dean song written by Brian Wilson that helped give Huntington Beach the moniker, Surf City. I, however, was never a surfer. I have an acute fear of breaking my neck and drowning which might have contributed to my eschewing this sport as a practical, recreational diversion. I should also mention that even though I see surfers virtually every day of my life, I know very little about the nuances of surfing. Huntington Beach is home to the International Surfing Museum, the Surfing Walk of Fame and the U.S. Open Surfing Championships. I feel like a guy who moved to Cooperstown but doesn’t know what a Louisville Slugger is and has never heard of Babe Ruth.

It is the ancillary aspects of the surf culture I enjoy the most. For starters the sport takes place at the beach and I respect the hell out of that. This, to me, is one of its most appealing features.

The sport attracts a somewhat younger crowd. Many of these surf enthusiasts wear bikinis. I have never gotten over how good a two-piecer can look on the right person. Gawking at these forward thinking fashion mavens of the sand is lots easier these days. Virtually every one of these young women are texting one another at all times. Seeing a girl texting while on a pair of roller blades in a bikini is just precious. They are hunched over at the shoulders, head down with both hands together on their iPhones. If you could pry their communication tethers out of their lively, warm hands it would look like they were praying. It is almost angelic… almost. Every five or six minutes they look up and dart their head around from side to side to see if they are missing anything. They are missing alot. For starters, they are missing life and the old guy staring at their legs. They remind me of those gophers that pop their heads out of their holes every few minutes for about 2 seconds, check their surroundings and then, it is right back in the hole before you can say, “ohMaGawd.”

I also have great fondness for the old surf instrumentals. Surf music is another great example of American roots music. Surf music has its roots planted in the sand, yet those roots have spread to many parts of the larger music world. I don’t think many folks think of surf music as roots music. There are three principal reasons for this: 1) Many people do not associate California with having any roots in the first place, 2) The form is a mere 50 years old, 3) Surf music had an extremely short regional incubation period. It became wildly popular and spread across the country and the world faster than a Southern California wild fire.

I grew up in an age where instrumental rock and roll could be heard on AM radio. Back in the day you could hear thousands of transistors in the sand. The radio played songs from all the great surf bands like the Chantay’s, the Pyramids, the Safaris, the Bellaires, the Astronauts, the Challengers, the Satellites and the most famous surf band of all them all, the Ventures. The Ventures, who are still the best selling instrumental group of all time, are said to be the band that launched a thousand bands. The so-called king of the surf guitar, Dick Dale, could be heard at the nearby Rendezvous Ballroom in Newport Beach. Music of all kinds including surf bands would often open for national touring acts at the Golden Bear which sat directly across Pacific Coast Highway from where Huntington Beach hosts the U.S Open Surfing Championships each August.

Many folks associate the Beach Boys with this culture. Surf music is instrumental music… period. No exceptions. The Beach Boys are primarily a 'beach band'. However, it might surprise some people to know that even the Beach Boys, known for their tight vocal harmonies and songs of Southern California youth culture in the 1960’s, recorded a few surf instrumentals on their early records. Keeping with the surf band tradition, the Beach Boys even recorded many surf tunes made famous by other artists. They did Dick Dale’s Let’s Go Trippin’ and Miserlou for instance. They even recorded the Bill Dogget classic Honky Tonk.

The reason surf music is instrumental music is because it was played by live bands in auditoriums where surfers would show 8 millimeter films (without sound) of themselves and their buddies while narrating to live audiences that day’s exploits on the waves. “This is Steve just south of the pier. Check out this gnarly ride. Now he is in the green room…Rad. Extremely tubular...” You simply can’t do that while someone is singing. The surf film as art reached its zenith in 1966 with Bruce Brown’s iconic documentary, The Endless Summer. The soundtrack was performed by an Orange County surf band called the Sandals (also known as the Sandells).

It is not a coincidence that the surf sound and the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation flourished at the same time and in the same county. It was the treble heavy, reverb drenched sound coming from the Fender guitars and amps that propelled these mostly up-tempo tunes. The fast alternate picking and heavy use of the tremolo bar was a familiar feature of this music. It has been said that this sound was designed to sound like the inside of a wave. I never got this. To me the sound of the inside of a wave sounds very much like my own voice screaming, “OH SH******T!”

Surf music wasn’t the only instrumental rock that could be heard on the radio. Young ears were already conditioned to hear guitar and sometimes tenor or baritone saxophone led instrumental bands in the late 50’s and early 60’s that weren’t necessarily associated with the surf culture of Southern California. Artists like Link Ray, Santo & Johnny, Duane Eddy, King Curtis, the Champs and others were early pioneers in instrumental rock and roll.

The surf culture of Orange County impacted music from all over. The iconic, treble laden, reverb rich, lead guitar line in the James Bond theme first heard in the 1962 movie Dr. No, is a great example of how far and how fast this sound traveled the globe.

I can remember as a kid the first time I heard Booker T. and The MGs’ Green Onions coming out of the transistor radios on the beach. I thought it was the coolest surf tune of all time. I didn’t know it was a blues, based on Sonny Boy Williamson’s Help Me. The surf instrumentals helped to make instrumental music a viable commodity in contemporary rock and roll and even blues. Freddy King made one instrumental song after another for the King/Federal label in those years. I heard blonde-headed surf bands play Hide–a–Way, Sen-Sa-Shun and San-Ho-Say. I remember hearing those tunes and thinking that this “surf” music is really cool. The cross pollination of cultures came full circle when Freddie King recorded his own surf influenced, instrumental called Surf Monkey.

The surf music craze however ended faster than it started and only a few years later. Times were indeed a changin' and the fun in the sun image that was conjured up by surf music seemed out of step with the serious issues of the Vietnam War-era youth culture in America. Young people had something more serious on their mind and it didn’t have anything to do with catching the perfect wave. The only instrumental protest song I am aware of is Hendrix’s interpretation of the Star Spangled Banner with his Strat creating violent imagery and new meaning to the phrase, “rocket’s red glare and bombs bursting in air.”

Even though surf music has been pushed off center stage, a contemporary San Diego based surf band called Los Straitjackets recorded and toured with blues man Eddie “The Chief” Clearwater in the early part of this new millennium. They played surf instrumentals at the world famous Troubadour in West Hollywood just a couple of weeks ago. They opened up for Southern California's own roots rocker Dave Alvin. After an electrifying performance by Alvin, he brought up to the stage the members of Los Straitjackets to join him on what he called a California folk song. The band then launched into the Riviera’s post card from California to their jealous friends back home in South Bend, Indiana, Warm California Sun. I thought to myself, it is good to be out here having fun....

Blues guitar legend Junior Watson incorporates a surf instrumental medley into his sets from time to time. Like myself, surf music represents nostalgia for Watson. Growing up in the small central valley farm town of Tulare was where the guitarist first heard surf bands. I asked Watson recently if surf music had any great influence on blues music. He said that it hadn’t to any great degree but went on to say every guitarist in the state of California, regardless of what kind of music they played, was influenced by surf music.

The irony of all this discussion of beach culture is that I don’t do the beach very well. I have never had a tan and can get a sun burn standing in the shade. I don’t incorporate the words dude, rad or gnarly with ease into my sentences. Yet every word I have ever written for BLUES JUNCTION was committed to keyboard while wearing swim trunks. As disturbing of an image as this may be, it is a fact.

Gone for me are the days of being within walking distance in Houston, Texas of about half a dozen juke joints where you could hear great local musicians like Clarence Holliman, Joe Guitar Hughes, Texas Pete Mays, Jerry Lightfoot, Milton Hopkins, Ezra Charles, Grady Gaines and others virtually any night of the week. Regional acts that had international followings would come through the Big “H” at least twice a year like Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Marcia Ball, Anson & the Rockets with Sammy Myers, Angela Strehli, Albert Collins and a couple of guitar slinging brothers from Dallas and their bands. This is where I feel most comfortable. I had a great time leaning against a bar with some old timers who were smoking menthols, drinking Black Velvet and listening to blues music. Those old guys taught me a lot. I was in heaven.

Now I have to settle for mere paradise. I have been back in my home state for some time and many of those players have moved on as well. You don’t have to be surfer to live in Huntington Beach and you don’t have to be of any racial, cultural or sociological background to play or enjoy blues music. So I write about American roots music (mostly blues), ogle girls in bikinis and think about that old saying I just made up. “Remember you can take the man out of the juke joint but you can’t take the juke joint out of the man.”

Occasionally, great blues music comes to the O.C. and when that happens, you’ll find me there. Even if the place is the Hyatt Huntington Beach Resort and Spa, where world class blues musicians play in front of indifferent tourists from all over the world on Saturday evenings in the summer. With salt water dripping off their nose and kids wearing mouse ears they do their best to treat the musicians with as much disrespect as they can muster. Eventually the blues will get to them. When this happens a guy wearing a brand new Hawaiian print shirt, tucked into his khaki’s might turn and say, “These guys are great. Why haven’t I heard of them before?” I might say, “That’s because they are playing blues music.” Invariably tourist boy will laugh and say, “No they’re not. This stuff is good.” Tourists… can’t live with them, can’t live next door to a massive resort property without them.

Walking on the beach and not behind a lap top is where most of my story ideas come from. This, I hope in some way, excuses the swim trunk confession. Sometimes during these creative journeys, I’ll see a surfer and the sound of the old surf instrumental will creep into my head. We all have to be from somewhere and even a bluesman in a tourist town isn’t above a little nostalgia now and again…Dude.

- David Mac

Note: No texting bikini clad roller bladers were harmed as result of the research and writing of this article. I did however observe two texting, bikini clad roller bladers run head on into one another. Thankfully, neither woman sustained any injuries and they didn’t drop their smart phones. Both Haley and Ashley confirmed this by saying (going), “It was like all (pregnant pause) whatEVER.”